Cinnamon vs Mate - opinions

[BigSilly]

MATE is not a "Gnome 2 fallback mode for Gnome 3". It's a complete fork of the old Gnome 2 codebase. In effect, it's Gnome 2. Nothing to do with Gnome 3 whatsoever. Cinnamon is a shell for Gnome 3. It sits on Gnome 3 like Gnome Shell and Unity, except Unity uses Compiz as a window manager instead of Mutter/Muffin.

[BBQdave]

MATE is... fork of the old Gnome 2 codebase. In effect, it's Gnome 2. Nothing to do with Gnome 3 whatsoever. Cinnamon is a shell for Gnome 3. It sits on Gnome 3 like Gnome Shell and Unity, except Unity uses Compiz as a window manager instead of Mutter/Muffin.

With all the splintering of Gnome, I question positive outcomes.
I wonder if Clem and crew will focus on LMDE with Xfce and KDE?
Will RHEL switch client desktop to Xfce?
And Ubuntu with Unity is an uphill climb, a lot of work needed there.

So I think you will see the core players (Fedora and Debian) switch focus to Xfce.

My $0.02 worth

[BigSilly]

With all the splintering of Gnome, I question positive outcomes.
I wonder if Clem and crew will focus on LMDE with Xfce and KDE?
Will RHEL switch client desktop to Xfce?
And Ubuntu with Unity is an uphill climb, a lot of work needed there.

So I think you will see the core players (Fedora and Debian) switch focus to Xfce.

My $0.02 worth

My plan is to let them figure it out.

I have enough going on in my own everyday life to be worrying about Linux desktops. I'll just use whatever works and whatever I fancy at any given time.

[qyot27]

With all the splintering of Gnome, I question positive outcomes.
I wonder if Clem and crew will focus on LMDE with Xfce and KDE?
Will RHEL switch client desktop to Xfce?
And Ubuntu with Unity is an uphill climb, a lot of work needed there.

So I think you will see the core players (Fedora and Debian) switch focus to Xfce.

My $0.02 worth

'Splintering' of GNOME? The only 'splintering' is MATE being branched off of GNOME 2. The Unity/Gnome Shell/Cinnamon thing isn't splintering because they're all sitting atop an unbranched GNOME 3 - it's only the shell that's different (and IMO, having competition between different shells is a good thing even if the road getting to that point was really rough).

MATE will be included in Fedora 18, so it'll eventually show up in RHEL as well. It also apparently is being/was brought into Sabayon, aside from it having originated in Arch (really, the most likely guess is that the other source-oriented distros have had it available for quite some time anyway).

Unity has matured a lot since it was first introduced, and I can tolerate using it just fine depending on circumstances (having a nice big monitor and screen resolution go a long way, and capable hardware). Not that it matches the experience of a traditional desktop, but for that I have LXDE (or I'd use MATE if I wasn't on such an ancient computer; post-2009, GNOME 2 proper was hard enough on this thing as it was).

[BigSilly]

The Unity/Gnome Shell/Cinnamon thing isn't splintering because they're all sitting atop an unbranched GNOME 3 - it's only the shell that's different (and IMO, having competition between different shells is a good thing even if the road getting to that point was really rough).

I agree with you. I think users not happy with the mobile/tablet paradigm in either Windows, Mac or Linux have a great deal of excellent options to choose from now. There's something for everyone, and that is testament to the power of both Gnome and Free software in general.

[vasa1]

...
I have enough going on in my own everyday life to be worrying about Linux desktops. I'll just use whatever works and whatever I fancy at any given time.

Totally agree with this sentiment.